Carl Young’s AcroViews

Importing Lists into ComboBox Form Fields

ComboBoxes are one of the most useful features of electronic forms. Often called pull-down lists, ComboBoxes present the user with a list of choices. ComboBoxes are probably the most popular form field type after text boxes.

One annoying aspect of Acrobat’s ComboBox is its one-at-a-time entry restriction. You can’t import a list of 50 items from an Excel column, for example. You have to copy and paste each cell from Excel into Acrobat.

However, you can use the Draw module of OpenOffice to create PDF ComboBoxes. A great feature of OpenOffice Draw is that you can copy and paste the contents of a entire column of Excel data into its ComboBox object. I’ve done 100 or so objects at a time. This technique is a great time saver if you have a form with many ComboBoxes. See my demo for an example of how this process works.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Acrobat, or Illustrator, or InDesign, supported this kind of import into ComboBoxes? If so, speak up and respond to this blog post.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under PDF Forms, Acrobat Annoyances. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Importing Lists into ComboBox Form Fields

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